hire a personal webdesigner

[william232]

hi

i have found a company in india that i am.thinking of providing my design work to good idea to.have a virtual employee as they charge only 12 dollars an.hour or part time is 40 hours for 800 a month where as fulltime 88 hours is 1200 a month is this a good idea?

[ralph.m]

Hmmmmmm. Personally, I'd be hiring locals ... people whom you can meet and get to know rather that people far away who seem cheap. But it's your call.

[donmarvin]

Wow, that's so naive.

Many people have tried that and failed. A good number of my clients were people who had been burned by these "cheap" overseas developers. They had to pay twice, because they had to pay me to fix what the overseas developer couldn't do.

The hourly rate is meaningless -- if it takes someone 10 times as long to get the job done, what good is it if they are charging half as much as others.

I had a small project that should have taken 4-8 hours depending on skill level. I asked an overseas developer who had very low rates for an estimate. They said it would take 40 hours!

[metavisia]

William, the hourly rate is too low so I don't know... They could be a start-up with less experience, but willing to learn and good programmers, so they may do the job.

But I think $12/hour is too little. We're in Bulgaria, our prices can compete with India's and we've got pretty good programmers here (I'm not sure if you know that Bulgaria is a preferred IT outsourcing destination for many companies). And yet I think at $12/hour you can't keep a good programmer, so it probably will be some newbie. We work with experienced guys only who know their job well, and our rate is $28. Well, I can get it down a bit if the hours are many, but under $20/hour isn't an option if I want to keep the good programmers.

Somebody else wrote you need to once pay the cheap guys, and then pay again somebody else to fix their job. Totally true, we're sometimes hired to fix the mess the others made. By the way, the last time we did that was fixing a web site which some US company tried to make, so it actually doesn't matter if it's an Indian or an American - cheap & dirty is cheap & dirty anywhere.

Another thing - companies with low hourly rate usually take a lot of hours to do things, so at the end you pay more. I find it very unfair because when I tell a client "$28/hour", he says F... of, I have this guy for half of that. And then he does the job for 50 hours whereas it would have taken us 10.

My advice is - try them for something little. Then try somebody else with a proper price, again with a little task. Make a comparison and you'll see which one works better for you.

<snip>

Regards, George

[Sagewing]

I'm in the business of finding great offshore vendors and you can certainly find one. But, Indian designers are frequently not skilled enough to do quality work to a western standard/taste, and at that hourly rate it's very unlikely you'd be satisfied. You may find the needle in a haystack, but that's a pretty big haystack to search through.

I concur with George above, that the $20 price point is usually where the less skilled/experienced developers drop off. But, there are lots of exceptions to this if you know where to look. Typically a solid designer will cost more than $20/hr.

[william232]

Hi Guys,

i am not referring to the development side but mainly the design so i use them for Design only and ill code it back into html/css

[Sagewing]

That is what was addressed in the thread. You'll generally have a much harder time finding good designers offshore than developers, so your plan is highly risky.

[Tranker]

I prefer hiring locally as well. There are good & cheap virtual workers, but there are 10 absolutely terrible workers per good worker.
Finding the good workers is the challenge. For some cheap design I hired a college designer for $15/H and got great quality.

[ibuyforums]

IMHO, you get what you pay for. And don't be surprised if you waste 5 times the time for work that should have taken a fraction of what it did.

[william232]

the reason i ask this is i have found a company that has got a portfolio with the following websites and applications done.


This is some of the work the company has done they have 4 locations US,Australia and India

http://www.teaminindia.co.nz/portfolio/index.htm

What do you guys think of this business they have designers,programers and seo people for hire aswell.

Worth the risk?

[Sagewing]

If all the Indian body shop companies, that one is one of the most body-shoppy of them all.They offer every technology ,every service, and everything you could ever need. I bet they are cheap, too. Your mileage may vary, but I would predict mediocre work if you are lucky. But, give it a shot if you feel compelled - you might get lucky.

[TechnoBear]

Hmm ... hard to see how a business which gives its address as Australia, using a .co.nz domain registered to somebody in India, could be a member of the FSB, which is a UK business organisation. They're not using the logo in accordance with FSB guidelines and I can't find them in the FSB business directory. Neither of those things is proof that they are not members, but they're enough to make me suspicious. I've also run a couple of their sites through the W3C Validator. 262 XHTML errors in a single page is quite impressive. I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole, but as sagewing says, it's up to you.

[markbrown4]

If all the Indian body shop companies, that one is one of the most body-shoppy of them all.They offer every technology ,every service, and everything you could ever need. I bet they are cheap, too. Your mileage may vary, but I would predict mediocre work if you are lucky. But, give it a shot if you feel compelled - you might get lucky.

Yeah, I wouldn't trust these guys to develop an HTML email. The video is very revealing.